Photowalks in Tokyo: the textures & colours of Moto-azabu

I went out with one of my photography students today, to have a wander around parts of Azabu with the intention of looking at texture and colour. Here’s some of my shots from the walk we had together.

Tokyo is a fascinating and multi-faceted city. Walk a few metres from any main road and you can suddenly find yourself in a quiet backstreet that has the feel of a small village. Tokyo is, perhaps, nothing more or less than thousands of villages strung together.

Meeting with one of my regular photo students today, we decided to focus on textures and to shoot in colour, Several of the first lessons we’d done together had been spent shooting only in monochrome.

The area around Azabu-juban is full of characterful backstreets. A few of the areas we explored today were ones I hadn’t walked around for maybe five or six years. It was nice to go back, to see how they’d changed. Some had changed a lot and may soon not have any resemblance to what they used to be like. That’s happening all the tie in Tokyo, more so recently it seems. Maybe I’m just getting more sensitive to the changes but they seem to be speeding up.

All of the shots in the gallery below were shot with either the Kodak Ektachrome P picture control I made for the Nikons [which resembles the crushed blacks and over-saturated colours of a kind of twist you could put on the E6 process, that I used to do in the darkroom]. Or, shot using the Vivid-02 picture control that I adapted from the ‘Vivid’ that comes supplied with every Nikon DSLR.

The files have simply been converted to JPEG from the RAWs that I shot today.